Many companies store, package, and ship items and/or groups of items from materials handling facilities. For example, many e-commerce companies and some traditional retail companies house inventory in a materials handling facility and ship items to various destinations (e.g., customers, stores) from the materials handling facility. Receipt of inventory in the materials handling facility, storage of inventory within the materials handling facility, shipping of items from the materials handling facility and the overall flow or movement of items within the materials handling facility (e.g., from receive to storage and/or from storage to shipping) is often labor intensive. In many instances, a single item may be handled by multiple human agents during a particular flow of the item through the facility. Multiple human interactions increase the costs to handle the item, the time to complete a flow of the item through the materials handling facility, and increase the opportunity for mis-handling of the item.
While implementations are described herein by way of example, those skilled in the art will recognize that the implementations are not limited to the examples or drawings described. It should be understood that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit implementations to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.